


Paper Crowns

by tryceratops



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-30
Updated: 2014-10-30
Packaged: 2018-02-23 04:40:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2534537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryceratops/pseuds/tryceratops
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Natasha's Christmas dinner was awful and one time it was just right.</p>
<p>Or </p>
<p>Three times Clint ruined Natasha's Christmas dinner, two times someone else did, and one time she just made it her goddamn self.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paper Crowns

**Author's Note:**

> This can tie-in to my "Stuck With Us" fic, but it stands on its own just fine.

1

Her first Christmas after leaving the Red Room is spent in a concrete cell sixty feet underground. She’s been there for four months, detoxing, slowly undoing the years of work that had been put into her brain, making her the perfect weapon. She doesn’t know what day it is, has no idea that it’s something special until she hears one of her guards grumbling about working on a holiday. Some quick math leads her to figure out that it’s Christmas. She hasn’t been keeping track of the exact length of time she’s been down there; she knows they could be screwing with her, pushing meal times slightly closer together or slightly farther apart to mess with her perception of time. But even without trying she’s able to keep track of the approximate date, assuming they haven’t been screwing with her schedule too much.

So she’s able to figure out that it’s December. Though she’s never celebrated it, she knows everything there is to know about Christmas: standard traditions, carols, and prayers for twenty three different countries, sixteen different Christmas sermons for six different denominations, and she could rattle off a list of acceptable gifts for various relations, coworkers, or friends in seconds.

But that’s all in the abstract. She is able to perfectly pretend that she’s celebrated Christmas before, in a multitude of different ways, whether she’s in Bulgaria, Mexico, or South Africa. No one would ever doubt her. It was her job to be able to blend in perfectly.

But she’s never really celebrated a Christmas before. She’s never had friends and family around her, never celebrated the same traditions year after year. She’s never given a gift out of care rather than obligation, and she’s never received a gift that she had bothered to keep. She’s never eaten a real Christmas dinner, no duck or turkey or chicken or ham, or anything else that is traditionally eaten on the day.

So she doesn’t understand why the guard is so upset at having to guard her instead of be at home with a family. She’s never had a family to miss, not that she can remember, anyways. She’s never seen her knowledge of the holiday as useful for anything other than work. For her, Christmas is all about working. All her knowledge is to help her blend in, help her disappear. People lower their guard on holidays. They get lazy. They eat too much, smile too much, laugh too much, drink too much, and that makes them perfectly vulnerable to be killed. Holidays, to Natasha, had always been about work.

Now that they’ve started pulling the Red Room out of her head, though, she begins to question it, to consider the guard’s complaints. Holidays were days marked on the calendar, days of rest. The guard had been expecting all year to have this one day off, and he was being forced to work. But, of course, he must be getting extra pay for it. And probably a different day off. So why the annoyance?

Perhaps he has a family to see, a young child or two who won’t understand why their father isn’t there with them for this day that is supposed to, according to some, be about family. But he had chosen this job, and working for an agency such as SHIELD, surely he would know better than to have a family. A family would make him vulnerable, leave him open to manipulation. It would be foolish for him to have children.

She is still pondering why the guard is so upset at working today when they bring in her meal tray. Everything is served on a paper plate, pre-cut into bite sized pieces, and she is given only a small plastic spoon with which to eat. Every non-food item on the tray is carefully accounted for at the end of each of her meals, and she knows she is supervised carefully via the video feed into her cell as well. They take no risks with her. The tray itself would serve as enough of a weapon if she ever decided she really wanted out, so she’s not sure why they go through all the work with everything else. Maybe they don’t realize it, or maybe there’s something else going on in their heads. Maybe it’s a test.

Her meal today is different, slightly. She can tell right away that the meat she is served is turkey. She’s never had it before, but she learned how to cook it years back, during her initial training. It’s drizzled with a watery gravy, and there are mashed potatoes and some stuffing on the plate as well. Her cup is also made of paper  and has only a couple mouthfuls of water in it. Really, it’s a pitiful meal, but she’s had worse. Eating is about sustenance, not about enjoyment. And so she carefully begins to eat, scooping up a few pieces of her pre-cut turkey onto her spoon.  The meat is dry, the gravy flavourless, but she doesn’t care. She eats mechanically, as she has done every meal since she arrived. The potatoes are gritty, probably made from powder rather than proper potatoes. She doesn’t care.

Once she’s cleared her plate and had her water, she places everything back on the tray, in clear view of the camera, and places it at the slot in her door where the trays come in and out. It takes less than thirty seconds for someone to slide the slot open and remove her tray.

She walks over to her bed: iron frame welded to the floor, a thin mattress, one scratchy wool blanket and a tiny pillow. Again clearly designed to reduce the number of potential weapons in the room, but she can think of at least seven ways to kill someone with just her mattress, blanket, and pillow just off the top of her head. Not that she would need them. She knows, and suspects that they know, that if she were ever to decide to leave this place, she could.

But she doesn’t. Because she’s been given a different option, a better option. She just has to prove herself to them, prove that she won’t turn on them, that she can be trusted. And, as time goes on, she slowly realizes that she wouldn’t mind being trusted. The only people who have ever trusted her before were targets; they all wound up dead by her hands.

To be trusted by someone who knows what she is capable of, someone who knows she can kill him with both hands tied behind her back, that would be different. And, she thinks, it would be nice. To have someone she wouldn’t have to hide herself from—to have a real self at all, actually. She’s always been so good at moulding herself to being who she needs to be for a mission, for survival, that she’s not sure she knows who she really is at all. She knows more who she’s not: she’s not the type of person who will complain about working on a holiday. She’s not a person who will even celebrate a holiday of her own free will. Not yet, at least. But that, she thinks, is something she may be convinced to do at some point.

She  crosses her arms under her head and stares up at the ceiling, trying to imagine where she’ll be at this time next year, or in ten years. Will she ever be the type of person to celebrate a holiday, to care about them? It seems like such a foreign concept to her, but, deep inside she notes a strange new emotion: longing. She is, somehow, a bit jealous of a guard who has something, _someone_ to go home to tonight, who has something to look forward to beyond the next mission.

Maybe someday she will have that, after all. Maybe someday she won’t have to always worry about being compromised, about having weaknesses. Maybe someday she will manage real connections with people without having to kill them, or be killed by them.

It’s all such a foreign concept, but as they say, a girl can dream.

* * *

 

2

Natasha’s second Christmas after leaving the Red Room is spent in what must be the least insulated shack in the entire universe. It’s more of a box made of old, unsanded two by fours with a small wood stove in the middle, making a feeble attempt at heating the place. She’s Russian, she’s used to the cold, but goddamn, she can still complain about it. The wind manages to slip through the cracks between the boards, and she scoots closer to the stove, opening it and sliding another log onto it, hoping it might do something to break the cold.

The shack is about twenty feet from the Atlantic Ocean, about thirty kilometers outside of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Her— _their_ target is supposed to be trying to sneak in tonight on a fishing boat, and her— _their_ mission is to stop him before he does. He has information that he intends to leak, and SHIELD needs to be sure that that does not happen. And so here she is, in a drafty ten-by-ten foot shack on a cliff in the middle of nowhere, waiting for her handler/partner/”friend,” Barton, to come back with supplies to keep them going through the night.

The door slams open and Natasha has her gun drawn in a second, aimed right at the forehead of whoever is in the doorway. She slowly lowers it as she realizes it’s just Barton, back with a bag of groceries in one hand and a bundle of firewood in the other. He sets them both down and shuts the door behind him, brushing snow off his jacket once he’s sure the door is secured.

“Anything come in over the radio yet?”

Natasha shakes her head. “No sign of them yet.” There’s a second team, just there for supervision (of her or of their target, she’s not entirely sure), who are keeping an eye on the coast, watching for any sign of the ship coming in.  So far there’s been complete radio silence from them, as it should be. The more they communicate the better chance their messages have of being intercepted.

“I brought food.” 

Natasha eyes the grocery bag thoughtfully. As far as she is concerned, Barton is the most trustworthy person working at SHIELD: he didn’t kill her when he had the chance, and he didn’t fuck up their previous—and first—mission together.  He’s competent (more than competent: good), and he clearly has some sort of... sympathy for her? She’s not sure what to call it, she just knows that he seems to hold some kind of emotions toward her other than ambivalence, apathy, or outright hatred. Something a bit more positive. Or less negative, at least.

“What did you get?”

“All I could find at the convenience store. Two pre-cooked chicken breasts, some craisins, chocolate, and Doritos.”

“What are craisins?”

“Raisins, but made of cranberries. Closest thing to a proper turkey dinner I could manage.”

“Chicken breasts and cranberry raisins.” Her tone is flat, but there is a lot of judgement in her non-judgemental tone.

“Just like turkey with cranberry sauce.”

“I had better food when I was in SHIELD’s cell.”

“Oh, come on ‘Tasha, it’s not that bad!”

Tasha. He’s been calling her that since their first mission together. She doesn’t object outright to the familiarity it implies, but she’s not quite sure she likes it either. She’s more or less just decided that objecting will take too much energy, it will be a pointless argument. So she’s accepted it.

“We’ll warm up the chicken on the stove, it’ll be great.”

She looks uncertain, but she shrugs. “If you say so.”

“I do.” He fishes two packages of… apparently chicken breasts out of his shopping bag and, after unwrapping them, places them on top of their stove. “There. We’ll give them a while and then flip them, and then you’ll have the tastiest Christmas dinner you’ve ever had.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Trust me. You haven’t really eaten until you’ve had an official Hawkeye meal.”

“And this is what you want to assign your trademark to?”

He shrugs. “I do my best work when I improvise.”

She raises an eyebrow at him but says nothing in response to that.

They sit in silence for a while after that, the howling of the wind the only sound they have. Barton waits about fifteen minutes before getting up and flipping the chicken breasts over.

“Is this how you usually spend holidays?”

“What, in a shack next to the ocean cooking chicken on an ancient wood stove?”

She shrugs. “Working.”

“Sometimes. People tend to do shifty stuff on holidays. Someone’s gotta be around to stop them.”

“And you don’t mind working holidays?”

“Do you?”

She shakes her head. “I’m different.”

“Are you?”

She eyes him carefully, unsure of what he’s getting at.

“I’ve always worked holidays. It’s nothing new to me.”

“It’s not exactly new to me, either.”

“I’m sure you had holidays as a child.”

“You didn’t?”

She smiles wryly at him. “I’m sure you know the answer to that.”

“So you’ve never had a real holiday before.”

She shrugs. “What makes something a real holiday?”

“Gorging yourself on food, drinking too much, watching bad TV, not worrying about work…”

“Then I’ve never had a real holiday.”

“What’s the closest you’ve come?”

She allows herself to consider it. “Last Christmas then, I suppose.”

“Weren’t you already here last Christmas?”

“I didn’t have to worry about work, I had my first turkey dinner. I didn’t get to drink too much or watch bad TV, but I’ve never done either of those, so you’ll have to forgive me for that.”

He looks at her in surprise. “Alright, ‘Tasha, we’re taking next Christmas off, and making you have a proper celebration.” He leans over and prods at the chicken on the stove with his finger. “I think it’s ready.” He pulls one off the stove with his fingers and hands it to Natasha. She takes it without reacting to the heat in her hands. It feels nice, after the chill of the evening. He takes the second one for himself and sets it carefully in his lap before reaching into the bag and pulling open the bag of craisins. “Here we go, a true Clint Barton Christmas dinner.” He offers her the bag of craisins and she hesitates before taking a handful and trying one.

“No!” She jumps ever so slightly as he cries out at her. “You’re doing it wrong! You have to eat them together. Like if you were eating the chicken with cranberry sauce.” He carefully places a few craisins on the chicken breast and then takes a bite. “Like that.” He says once he’s done chewing.

Natasha imitates him and then takes a bite, chewing thoughtfully. 

“Well?” Clint asks hopefully.

“Last year’s was better.”

Clint looks truly heartbroken. “You cannot be serious. I know the kind of slop they serve on base at SHIELD and there is no way that was better than this.”

She shrugs. “I’m just telling it as it is.”

He stares at her and then sighs. “I think you might truly be hopeless, ‘Tasha.”

She can’t help but smile ever so slightly at that. Barton looks like he’s about to say something else when the radio crackles to life. “Target visible, over.”

She looks at Barton and immediately drops her chicken and her handful of craisins on the floor and picks up her gun. Barton looks longingly at his chicken and takes one last bite before doing the same, grabbing his bow and shouldering his quiver before looking at her and nodding. “Let’s go.”

* * *

 

3

Natasha’s third Christmas with SHIELD is just as Barton promised. He applied early enough that he managed to secure the day off for both of them, though some bargaining was involved and he’d had to promise to work every New Year’s Eve for the next three years. He doesn’t tell any of that to Natasha, though. He just tells her that he got them the day off, and that he expects her to be at his apartment at 3pm on the dot for an evening of truly spectacular entertainment.

So she shows up at his doorstep at exactly 3pm on Christmas day and knocks three times. The door opens almost right away, revealing Barton in a bright red oversized Christmas sweater and a ratty old Santa hat.

“Welcome.” He steps back, leaving a path open for her to come in. She steps in, dressed in jeans, a dark t-shirt, and a red leather jacket.  He shuts the door behind her and holds out a hand to take her jacket, which she offers him silently, looking around his place. It’s the first time she’s been inside, though she’s seen it from the outside a few times previously. She has a small gift for him in the pocket of her jeans, and she allows her fingers to briefly brush over it, checking that it’s still there.

“Nice place.” She knows it’s what you’re supposed to say, so she says it. He hangs her jacket up on a hook and leads her down a narrow hallway into a kitchen/dining room area, where he offers her a seat at a scuffed up old oak dining table. She takes it and continues to look around, trying not to just check for the nearest exit, but to see it as a civilian might. It’s cozy, if that’s the proper word for it. Definitely a bit run down, but homey, clearly lived in. Comfortable. The polar opposite of her meticulously spotless, virtually empty apartment.

“Thanks. It’s not much, but…” he shrugs, “It’s home.”

She wants to ask if this is what a home is like to most people, if this is the kind of place children are raised, but she knows by now that his childhood was almost as unique as hers.

“It’s nice.” She repeats, having nothing else to say.

“So. I have a turkey in the oven.” He offers her a grin, “This year will definitely be the best Christmas dinner you’ve ever had.”

“Still upset about last year?” She gives him a small smile.

“Mortally offended.” He places a hand on his chest to highlight his pain.

“Well, you certainly have better facilities than last time.”

“I can cook on anything.”

“You say that, but…” She trails off. She knows he knows what she means.

“I think your taste buds may be off, rather than my cooking.”

“If you say so.”

This is how friendships are supposed to be, she knows. Banter, teasing, but all in the name of fun. She’s noticed over the past few months that she hasn’t had to try as much to make it work. It’s started coming more naturally.

“So, to make this a proper Christmas, we have to start with a proper Christmas movie.”

She raises her eyebrows expectantly.

“Come into my living room.” He gestures for her to follow him through another doorway and into a room with creaky hardwood floors, an overstuffed couch, and not much else. “Have a seat.” He gestures grandly to the couch, and she takes a seat on one edge, sitting up straight. “You are about to watch the best Christmas movie ever made.”

“That’s a pretty grand claim.”

“It is substantiated though. Let me introduce you to the cinematic masterpiece, the Christmas classic, Elf.”

“I haven’t heard of it.”

“It’s amazing, I promise.”

She gives him a skeptical look, but doesn’t object.

 

Halfway through she is already bored out of her skull, sure Barton picked the worst possible movie just to torture her. She hasn’t voiced her complaints yet, feeling that that would be rude to her host. Thankfully, she is saved from further Ferrell antics when the fire alarm begins going off. She twitches violently at the sudden loud noise, hand instinctively reaching for a gun that isn’t there, before she notices how calm Barton is. If there is one thing she’s learned over her time working with him, it’s that she can trust his reactions. So she relaxes slightly and waits to see what he does.

“Shit.” Clint mutters as he hops over the back of the couch and darts into the kitchen—only after stopping to pause the movie, of course.

Natasha stands and follows him into the kitchen to investigate the source of the alarm. Stepping into the kitchen reveals quite a picture. There is dark black smoke billowing from the oven. Barton has grabbed a tea towel and is fanning furiously at the smoke near the smoke detector, apparently trying to make the beeping stop.

She watches him fanning frantically for a solid minute and a half before she decides she should step in and help. She strides over to the oven and turns it off, turns the stove fan on, and opens the oven door. She looks around and grabs the oven mitts and carefully pulls a now very black turkey-shaped object from the oven and places it on the stove, directly under the fan. She kicks the oven door shut after that and then goes over to open the kitchen window, pushing it open as well to let the smoke out. The fire alarm promptly turns off.

Barton stops frantically waving his tea towel around and turns to look at her, and then evaluate how she handled the situation. “Right. Smart.” He nods, as if he had been testing her, and then goes over to examine the turkey. “Well, I don’t know how I managed to screw that up, I could’ve sworn I followed the directions exactly…”

“Either your directions were terrible or you did something very wrong.”

He sighs rather dramatically and pulls open a drawer, which is full nearly to bursting with takeout menus. “Well, I guess your best turkey dinner ever may have to wait. How does Chinese sound?”

* * *

 

4

Natasha’s fourth Christmas with SHIELD is once again spent on the job. She’s undercover this time, working her first solo mission since starting her work for SHIELD. Her job is essentially corporate espionage: she is to infiltrate a corporation as an assistant to one of the directors of the company, to gain information on a rumoured secret project involving the development of a recreation of the serum used to create Captain America. Appearing young and attractive and behaving competently yet naively, she has ingratiated herself with almost all the senior executives of the company           as well as most of the employees she regularly interacts with. She’s begun to hear the executives discuss something called Project Barbet in her presence, which had not been mentioned around her in the previous months she’s been working there.

So she spends her fourth Christmas with SHIELD working late—without having even complained about it, much to her employer’s satisfaction, typing up a proposal to be presented at a meeting on the twenty-eighth. She personally thinks it’s a bit ridiculous to have an employee work on Christmas just typing up a report for something that’s not for another three days, but she says nothing. She’s too close to getting in to dare risk angering anyone.

She remembers the not-too-distant past when she didn’t understand why someone would ever object to working on a holiday, and she figures it’s a testament to how far she has come that she does find it objectionable, even if it’s only in a vague sense.

When she finally finishes the report and has all the required copies printed out, stapled, and distributed to all the appropriate desks, it’s eleven PM and she’s exhausted. She never would have guessed that sitting in a chair all day could be so tiring, but then, she supposes, there’s a reason she’s never wanted to work a desk job. Not that she’s ever really had the choice, either.

She arrives home just before midnight and is so looking forward to kicking her heels off and changing into something comfortable, but something about her apartment sets an alarm bell off in her head. It smells different than usual. Someone else is inside.

 She slides her heels off carefully and, while bending over to remove them, uses the opportunity to grab the knife from her thigh, holding it carefully in her hand. She doesn’t turn the light on—no point in giving an intruder a better chance to see when she has the advantage of familiarity with the terrain.

She slips silently through her apartment, listening carefully for any indication that may give away the intruder’s location, and then she hears it: the creak of a floorboard in the kitchen. She knows the one, it’s about three feet away from her kitchen table. She adjusts her grip on her knife and then bursts in. The kitchen light is off, but she can see the shadow of someone well enough, and she launches at it—him—with a knee to his gut and then slamming him down hard on her kitchen table, shattering some dishes as she goes, but she doesn’t care. She has the intruder pinned down, a knee on his chest, and the knife at his throat, free hand fisted in his hair, before she realizes who it is.

“Clint.” Sometime in the past year he’s gone from being “Barton” to being “Clint” in her mind.

“Hi, ‘Tasha.” He grins up at her awkwardly from his place on the table. She releases him and stands up, leaving him room to get up. Only once he’s standing does she realize what the shattering of dishes and the strange smell in her apartment was.

“You cooked for me.” She is completely, utterly confused.

“Merry Christmas.” He’s brushing mashed potatoes off his shoulders, and she walks over to turn on a light to survey the extent of the damage. It appears that the table had been set for two, with dishes for mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, bread rolls, and some slices of turkey, all of which are now on the floor.

“You cooked for me.” She repeats, surveying the damage.

“I tried.” He grins awkwardly.

“Why were the lights off?”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“That was stupid.”

“I’m realizing that now.”

“Why are you here?”

“To cook for you.”

“I’m working.”

“Not right now.”

She frowns at him. “I’m on a job. I am working.”

He just shrugs. “Thought you could use some company on Christmas.”

“You could compromise this whole operation.”

“I doubt that.”

She gives him a _look_ but then sighs. “Do you think any of it is salvageable?” She gestures to the food. He turns to look at it. “I think it all has a bit of Hawkeye in it now.”

She sighs. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I should’ve known better than to try and sneak up on you.”

She looks at him and shakes her head. “I hope you have a change of clothes, because you’re going to draw a lot of attention to yourself if you try to walk home looking like that.”

* * *

 

5

By Natasha’s fifth Christmas with SHIELD, she has fully gained their trust. She is sent on more solo missions, given more freedom, and given access to more classified information. She finds it strange how much she appreciates the shows of trust, but she does nonetheless. Her fifth Christmas is spent in Lucerne, Switzerland, tracking down information on a high profile target who has somehow managed to stay under the radar for far too long. On paper, she is there as a tourist, but officially she is to meet with a contact who may have information on their target’s whereabouts.

She’s set up her cover well, visited all the necessary tourist attractions. She’s walked across the old wooden bridge, taken a trip up the Alps, visited the art gallery and the small local museum, and, of course, seen the famous lion carved into the cliff. And she has taken multiple pictures of everything. She has never been one for photographs, but what kind of tourist would she be without a camera? Natasha may have no room in her heart for nostalgia, but Sarah McKray, her cover, sure does.

There are only a few small challenges to playing a tourist. Pretending to be ignorant of French and German as she travels through Switzerland is the hardest. She’s fluent in both, but she makes out well enough pretending she just has high school level French and no more German beyond “danke” and “bitte”. She is good enough at what she does that feigning ignorance in a language is only a mild inconvenience, but it’s an inconvenience she hasn’t faced in a very long time. Of course, this also allows her to overhear conversations from those who assume she is just the ignorant American (and oh, she plays that part so well).

There are advantages to playing the tourist, too. It gives her freedom to look at everything, to gawk and stare, and to “accidentally” wind up in places she isn’t supposed to be. (“Oh, I’m so sorry sir, I couldn’t read the sign!”)

But Christmas Day finds her with very little to do. Everything to do is closed, the hotel she’s staying at on the lake is half empty, running only with a skeleton staff. They’re having a formal Christmas dinner in the dining room, which Natasha has signed up to attend (not to would likely seem strange). The restaurant in the hotel is excellent, and, though she’s loathe to admit it, she is actually a bit excited for a real Christmas dinner, finally, after so many years of… other things.

As for why she is alone in Switzerland as a tourist on Christmas, her explanation for that is very simple. She’s recently divorced and it’s her first Christmas alone. She’s always wanted to go to Switzerland, and what better way to show her ex-husband that she’s better off without him than taking her dream vacation on a holiday she used to spend with him? She’s cultivated her cover carefully: she has a very faded but still slightly visible tan line from where her ring would have sat on her left hand ring finger, her passport is brand new, reflecting her “switch” back to her maiden name, but her driver’s licence still has a married name on it. She has made a “mistake” on two pieces of emergency contact information forms, starting to write her ex-husband’s name and then crossing it out and writing her sister’s information instead. If someone were to investigate her history, they would find a five year old wedding announcement in a Missouri newspaper, they would find all the proper legal documents regarding the divorce, and they would find Jack Hayden, her ex-husband, recently moved to Los Angeles to accept a job at a law firm there. She’s confident in her cover, it couldn’t be tighter. She almost believes herself that Sarah McKray exists.

But still something isn’t sitting quite right with her. Something feels off about the whole job. She can’t place her finger on it, but she learned long ago to trust her gut about these things. She knows better than to panic just because something feels off. She keeps her cool, continues carrying on as if everything is normal, as if she is just a tourist, enjoying two weeks in Switzerland over the Christmas holidays, pampering herself with spa treatments on top of the alps and cheese fondue at the best (touristy) restaurant in Geneva, and currently, dressing for dinner for one in her hotel’s restaurant.

The advertised dinner is catering to the primarily American tourists who stay at the hotel. A traditional turkey dinner, more or less, though there is much more cheese on the menu than there would be at any real American Christmas dinner. Instead of mashed potatoes there are scalloped potatoes with cheese and milk, but there is turkey and stuffing. Natasha is sure that Clint would object to calling a meal without mashed potatoes “traditional,” but she has some advice about where exactly he can put that opinion if he ever decides to share it. This will be her first real, edible Christmas dinner, whether Clint objects or not.

Once she’s dressed in a navy blue dress with black kitten heels (and a knife on her thigh) she grabs a shawl to go around her shoulders and her room key and then heads down to the dining room for her dinner.

In the dining room, she is led to her seat, at a table right by a window overlooking the lake—really a gorgeous view—and is given some wine to start off her meal. She sips it carefully and glances around the dining room. There are seven other diners so far, one group of three old men, and a family of four. She is in a rather vulnerable position, her back to the door of the dining room and a giant window to her right, but she can manage. It’s dark enough out that the window shows reflections of what is going on in the room around her (though that also means she is even more visible to those on the outside). She stays on alert, the uncomfortable feeling in her gut not having gone away yet. Something bad is going to go down soon, she can tell.

Her meal starts off with soup, delicious and warm and complementing her wine perfectly. The main course of turkey, stuffing, and potatoes has just been brought out to her when the window next to her shatters, glass raining down on her and slicing her arm and shoulder open in three different places, and completely ruining her dinner.  

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” She cries out as she ducks under her table and draws her knife. Whoever picked this moment to attack her is going to pay dearly for the mistake.

* * *

 

+1

Natasha manages to get her sixth Christmas with SHIELD off, along with Clint, and she is determined to make it a proper Christmas. She’s had too many mishaps with Christmas dinners over the past five years, that she has decided it’s time she have a real one. She has done her best to cover all her bases: She’s not working, Clint’s not working, Clint’s not cooking, no one is surprising her, and, she hopes as much as she can that anyone who plans on trying to kill her is also taking the day off.

She starts cooking at noon in order to get everything ready on time for Clint’s planned arrival at 5. She’s bought the biggest turkey she can find: a twenty four pounder, and she knows that it will take over five hours to cook. She carefully prepares her stuffing and stuffs the turkey, sews it up, and begins roasting it. She makes two pie crusts and fillings (apple and strawberry rhubarb), she chops up yams, onions, turnips, and potatoes for roasting and boils potatoes for mashing. She collects turkey drippings for gravy and chops vegetables for a salad. Her timing is perfect and she has just put the root vegetables into the oven to roast when Clint arrives at 4:57 with a bottle of wine.

“Great timing.” She takes the wine and puts it in the fridge to chill.

“I try.” He shrugs and takes a seat at her kitchen table. “How long until we eat?”

“About fifteen minutes, assuming nothing catches on fire.” She smiles at him.

“One time…” He mutters.

“You know, we never finished that godawful movie, either.”

“Godawful---you’d better not be talking about Elf.”

“Of course I am.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to talk about Elf like that.”

“It’s perfectly reasonable to talk about Elf like that. It’s awful.”

Clint sighs. “You have no appreciation for cinema.”

Natasha smiles at him as a timer beeps, and she turns to check on the turkey and stir the gravy. “Alright, I think we’re almost ready.” She begins bringing dishes over to the already-set table, starting with the salad, then the mashed potatoes, then the roasted vegetables, then the gravy, and finally the turkey and stuffing.

“’Tasha, you know there’s only two of us here, right?” Clint comments, looking over all the food.

Natasha just shrugs. “Christmas dinner is supposed to be about excess, isn’t it?” She smiles, “and I can send you home with leftovers, I’m sure you’ll find something to do with them.”

She goes to the fridge and removes the bottle of wine, grabs two wine glasses, and carries them over to the table as well. Clint pops the cork and pours for both of them, and Natasha gestures at him to begin dishing up when he stands up suddenly. “Wait, I totally forgot. Just a second, I have to run out to my car.”

She waits patiently, sipping her wine until Clint returns with a large, flat box.

“I thought we agreed no gifts.”

“These aren’t gifts, they’re Christmas Crackers.” Clint grins at her.

“Christmas Crackers?”

“They’re these things I found out about working in Canada a couple years ago. You pull them apart, and—“

“You pull them apart and when they snap in half they make a bang and provide you with a prize. They’re common in commonwealth countries for large celebrations.”

“….Yeah. And they also have paper crowns.”

“Excuse me?”

“Paper crowns. Here, I’ll show you.” He pulls one out of the box—it looks a bit like a giant hard candy—and offers one end to her while holding the other end. Natasha takes the free end and pulls when Clint nods. The cardboard pops open with a bang, dropping a small, bright green, plastic spinning top on the table. Clint takes the cardboard from the middle and pulls out a piece of red tissue paper as well, unfolding it and showing Natasha how it makes a crown. “You have to wear one of these for Christmas dinner, it’s like the best kind of tradition.” He places it on her head, and she doesn’t object, though she feels a bit silly.

“This is mine too, then?” She spins the top. Clint nods. “I’ve never done this before.” She smiles. “I believe you need a crown too, then.”

Clint pulls a second cracker out of the box and holds one end out to Natasha again, and they repeat the process. This time the prize that falls out is a small puzzle, and the crown is yellow. Clint unfolds it and proudly puts it on his head.

“Alright, now we can eat.”

And, looking back on it, Natasha has to say, her sixth Christmas with SHIELD is just about perfect.


End file.
